Lesson Planning - 10+ Steps

Take a look at your department's scope and sequence/planning guide to ensure you are aligned with the department's pacing.

Make note of the standard for your lesson. It's important to break down all of your lesson components to align with the standards.

Take a look at the summative assessments you will using for this lesson. Make sure you are preparing students to be successful on the actual assessment you will be giving. For some teachers this is obvious, while for others it is not.

Look at all of the lesson resources that are available with your curriculum. We don't want to be "re-inventing the wheel." However, if your curricular content does not adequately relate to your students' levels of knowledge, you will not be able to use it.

Fill in the gaps for your lesson. At minimum, you will need a Warm-Up, Guided Lesson, Differentiated Student Practice, Mastery Check, and Exit Ticket.

It is effective to create checks for understanding in your slide deck. Nearpod is my current recomendation for that. It serves as a digital whiteboard for student work, and all of the student responses are saved for you.

For student practice, you will need to use an application that provides both immediate feedback and support to kids. Your practice also needs to provide tiered, differentiated practice options. Further, students should be placed into Flexible Groups. More on that on my flexible grouping page.

Your work does not end at the close of your lesson. You will need to review student responses on both the Mastery Check and Exit Ticket to determine who needs remediation on the content.

Finally, at the end of every week, I suggest displaying Progress Monitoring as a summary of all of the assignments along with who completed them. Monday when students arrive to class, they go right to the posted PM sheet for the previous week and make note of what work they still need to submit. We let students turn in classwork late for credit. (Use student IDs or some other anonymous way to identify students.)

That's about it for the basics! If you want to get fancy, and I suggest you do, you'll deliver instruction through a Blended Learning site. I recommend a class Google Site. More on that on my blended learning page.

If you really want to get fancy, and I hope you do, you'll experiement with one of the many, free AI applications for the classroom!